What Do We Really Know About the Suicides of Gay Teens?

When a gay 19-year-old from the middle of blood-red Oklahoma killed himself earlier this month, a lot of people assumed they knew exactly why he did it. I was one of them.

I wrote a DoubleX post criticizing fundamentalist Christians (who are a lot easier to find in Norman than, say, New York) for their hostility toward “boys like Zach Harrington.” After all, his suicide came just a week after a vicious city council meeting during which self-proclaimed Christians seethed about the “gay agenda” and castigated the city council for considering recognizing GLBT History Month. Harrington’s dad said he’d been bullied in high school. “Bullied Gay Teen Commits Suicide”–what more could you need to know?

But a Facebook message from Oklahoma has me rethinking my assumptions. The message was forwarded by a friend of mine, a journalism student at the University of Oklahoma, who was contacted by Lauren Cheney after her messages to two local newspapers were ignored. Cheney was a long-time friend of Harrington’s, and she’s angry at what she sees as an attempt to fit his death into a national narrative with no regard for the facts. “I and my friends know we don’t have the right to say why Zack [sic] truly committed suicide, but most of us don’t think it has anything to do with his being gay,” she wrote. “Zack was gay, yes. But this doesn’t mean that his homosexuality was definitely the only possible reason for committing suicide. It is possible for people to be chemically depressed.”

And sometimes this reductionism has happened not because of the facts, but in spite of them. Emily, last month you pointed out that just before he killed himself, Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi didn’t seem too worked up about the “webcam-wielding roommate” who is supposedly responsible for his suicide. But Clementi’s even-handed notes didn’t get anything like the attention that Dharun Ravi’s caustic tweets did, and most of the public was left with the impression that Ravi practically drove Clementi to the bridge he eventually jumped off.

Likewise, anyone who read the Norman Transcript story about Zach Harrington’s death (or my post on it) would have come away convinced that a Norman City Council meeting effectively ended his life. But Cheney says that’s absurd: “Zack was definitely a unique person, and most of us never knew what was going on in his head, but I certainly don’t think he would decide to commit suicide after this city council meeting. He would’ve blown it off and not cared about what they said, especially since it was voted 7-1 and passed! If anyone ever said anything hateful to him, which I can’t remember a time when that happened, he would’ve given them the finger and called them ignorant.”

Cheney is angry that so many people who know so little about Zach, his high school experience, or even whether he was at that city council meeting are so confidently pontificating about the source of his despair. “I am very upset over the fact that so many bullied young gays are taking their own lives, and I don’t want anyone to think I’m insensitive,” she says. But, “I just think it’s exploitation to throw my friend into the category.”

I still believe Christians of the Sally Kern school need to take the logs out of their own eyes , preferably before they get their hands on another microphone. But the rest of us need to acknowledge that there are different kinds of Christians–and different kinds of gay teenagers–and resist the urge to collapse them into the same category every time one of the former says something outrageous or one of the latter does something tragic.

Here’s Lauren’s entire message:

Lauren Lee Cheney October 16, 2010 at 4:00am